Usually represented by a percentage figure, PL details the amount of data that is failing to be received or sent by your PC. Ideally this should be zero - if you're playing a game with significant levels of PL, its almost certainly a nigh unplayable experience.
Data is transmitted in small units known as packets. Occasionally, packets are lost or delayed due to network congestion, resulting in dropped frames.
Sometimes you will experience a pause in which you can more around while everything else stays frozen in time, and after that you can't even move. This is when the information from the server is not reaching you. Information on the net is spilt up into bits of information called "packets", and when the packets aren't reaching you, this is called "packet loss." If you get disconnected from the internet, you will see a similar thing happen in the game. The lower the packet loss, the better.
The failure to transfer units of data between nodes on a network. A high percentage of packet loss would make transfers slow or impossible.
Delay or loss of packets in a transmission, usually caused by a slow or congested network. Packet loss causes breaks or hiccups in data, resulting in audio gaps or video distortion.
The percentage of packets that are lost during a round trip data transmission.
The discarding of data packets in a network when a device is overloaded and cannot accept any incoming data at a given moment.
The losses of data in a packet based network, usually due to congestion and consequent buffer overflow.
When there’s more traffic on a network than it was designed to handle efficiently, packets of data are dropped or fall out of place as they’re transmitted. If enough packets are lost or delayed, the data can be corrupted. If it is an email, for instance, a delay or loss of a few small bits of information would not be serious. If the packets were part of a voice or videoconference signal, the quality of the transmission will degrade – the voice will “break up†or the visual signal will be poor.
A problem that occurs when there is congestion at the packet switches or routers. It can considerably degrade real-time applications.
A basic measure of network reliability, an acceptable loss rate for a given application - time-critical services are more impacted with packet losses.
Packet Loss measures the reliability of a connection. A known chunk of data is sent to the router and then the router is supposed to send the same data back unaltered (echo). If the packet returns intact then there was 0% packet loss and that is good. If the packet returns with half of its data garbled or missing then that is 50% packet loss, which is poor. 100% packet loss means the packet never returned.
Packet loss occurs when one or more packets of data traveling across a computer network fail to reach their destination. Packet loss can be caused by a number of factors, including signal degradation over the network medium, oversaturated network links, corrupted packets rejected in-transit or faulty networking hardware.